Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year.
Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.
Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.
Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.
I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.
I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again
With Claude Code + Zed I might be cancelling mine as well.
I thought with Kotlin they'd invest a ton of energy into Kotlin Native in order to produce fully native IDEs that can squeeze out drastically more performance, but its been over a decade of nothing happening with Kotlin that's worthwhile (despite it having had so much potential, and being a literal key language for Android ???) so I'm really kind of over JetBrains, the only thing I'll miss is DataGrip since Zed is a code editor not a DB editor. Fleet was a good idea, but poorly done, the UI was weird as hell, and it did not feel like it was as snappy as something like Zed or Sublime.
> Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it.
I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.
I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.
I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.
I also cancelled my All Products subscription a while ago. I have been an IntelliJ user since the early 2000s and gave up after in 2025, it would still forget how a Maven project with some generated files should be built, with everything turning to a sea of red until you reimported the project and redid all your settings again. Job #1.
There was always a regression like this in every new build, along with the performance issues.
Also switched to Zed + Claude Code/Codex.
Really? I'm daily driving JetBrains IDEs on Apple M3 and don't recognize any if this. Just give it a bunch of extra heap memory (eg 4g instead if 1gb) and it's fast!
I have given it up to 30GB of heap and i tried many different GC configs, i even ran it and my project on ramdisk.
The issue is related to using a monorepo with lots of code in different languages - openening single folders is fine. Ut i want to be able to work on dozens of services in a single window, all other editors manage just fine
I know what I'm about to write is a meme, however: I stopped having any performance issue after switching to GNU Emacs for my code editing. Granted, as an infrastructure guy I the codebases I work with aren't always super large.
However, it's been crazy fast since always. Lately the lisp engine also got compilation to native code, so it's even faster. I occasionally get a slow down when I open a new project and emacs has to wait for the language server to boot.
> I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
Magit is cool :P
Also, emacs is free and runs pretty much everywhere. Truly worth learning.
It's true! I don't get people who shill for them, do they get paid? Are they employees or something?
Ever year or so I get someone telling me "no it's not bad bla bla, they fixed a lot of things, you should try it now", then I download it and it's the same bloated piece of crap that takes 5 seconds and maxes out CPU to autocomplete a word.
Same thing with Mozilla/Firefox, "no no, I promise you it's better now", I download it and it's the same crap, 100 %CPU all the time, ... The only change I see is bars/buttons keeps getting larger each time, lol.
I've been using Firefox and Jetbrains for about a decade. Firefox is currently using 0.8% CPU while streaming music in another tab. The only speed difference between it and Chrome is that Chrome will prefetch pages in the background, which appears to make it faster on clicks. However, even were it much slower than Chromium alternatives, I would never give up my fully functioning uBlock Origin.
But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.
More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.
It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.
I don't know how their IDEs were advertised to you or how large the codebases you work on are.
I get fast enough autocomplete (sub second), and full line completion just fine, and I never use/buy top of the line systems. (using a midrange ~2020 thinkpad).
But I'm in a similar place as the comment you replied to. Unless they start focusing again on improving they existing product line, next year I might not renew my licenses anymore.
Before AI took over, I was following closely their release notes and announcements because there where on the right path on improving experience.
What makes their IDE look bad is their indexing process, during which it is slow and completions will not show up. If you know about this quirk you know where to look for it (it's visible in the status bar), and know what triggers it (dependencies installation and such). After so many years, I really feel the solution for that is pretty "simple", "just" run the indexing on a snapshot that is not shared with the running instance and swap out indexes when done.
I know about the indexing, marking directories correctly so as not to trigger reindexing etc etc.
Since i work on a couple dozen services in a monorepo in a few languages, no amount of heap memory or CPU will be enough.
One days its the grapqhl plugin, the next day its typescript type inferrence, then something with rust, it just never stops. Sometimes even the golang operations are slow.
Its all just monorepo issues, but i expect my IDE to be able to handle a monorepo, all other IDEs work without issue (and are inferior in functionality sadly)
Everyone who promotes a product they use every day doesn't have to be a paid shill. I like PyCharm, DataGrip, and IntelliJ because they generally work very well for me at my day job and open source side projects.
Firefox is an odd case because I've personally never experienced stability issues with it on Ubuntu. The only problem I've had in the past is some Google products are noticeably slower than on Chromium. Colleagues of mine have had stability issues on Windows though.
Yeah, I'm not a paid shill. I have been using IntelliJ since version 2 way back in 2003(?). Yes, it's had its performance issues, but people tend to forget the feature set they brought to market, and have continued to do so. But, my career is dead now, as I am an unemployed loser. So, 2026 will probably be the first year that I no longer have an updated IntelliJ.
I'm about to cancel mine as well, but JetBrains really does make top quality editors, especially for their respective languages, the next closest one would be Visual Studio for C# / .NET development, and even VS gets enhanced by ReSharper... which is a JetBrains product. I would like it if JetBrains would invest in the performance isssues as a #1 priority. They've dropped the ball on Kotlin Native and it bewilders me, it had so much more potential to their benefit.
Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining two overlapping product lines.
I want to begin by saying I love JetBrains IDEs. I go out of my way to personally pay for PyCharm Professional, DataGrip, Rider, and others, and have done so for years, so I can use it at work where the next best thing provided to us is VS Code, or Visual Studio...
Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.
I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.
Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.
However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.
You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.
To pick up on one of the points in the article:
> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.
You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.
I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.
You'll have a smaller base of users that don't want AI slop, but will keep using your AI anyway even if it's there.
But what you lose is the large paying corporate customers that demand 'soup de jour' that end up going to VScode or whatever, and you may never get them back.
Building software is hard, being profitable at it is even harder.
If JetBrains want's to provide a simple plugin for Copilot or Anthropic to keep the vibe coders happy, I'm not going to complain about the feature. It just seems for the past couple years they have been primarily distracted with AI: AI Assistant, Junie, and now agentics.
It's probably a wise move and not so different to what many other companies have experienced in the past.
Netscape tried to remake Navigator whilst halting development on the old codebase, and it killed them.
Microsoft tried to remake Word, the rewrite failed. Luckily they had continued to develop the old codebase in parallel.
Google tried to remake Gmail multiple times. Every attempt failed.
Apple tried for years to remake MacOS Classic and failed every time. Eventually they had to buy and reskin NeXTStep.
Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up.
I kinda expected Fleet to die from the day it was first announced. IntelliJ is an extremely mature product that's hard to compete with. They've continually managed big changes to it to keep up with changing fashions and trends in the IDE space, most recently with their new Islands theme that launched yesterday, with integrated coding agents and so on. It's outlasted continuous competition from free IDEs that are always abandoned after enough years pass and whichever executive was championing subsidies moves on or retires (see: NetBeans, Eclipse, VS Express, MonoDevelop...). VS Code isn't so different. Fleet was clearly a reaction to that but the concept was not innovative and focused on reinventing wheels that users wouldn't be able to tell the difference for and which would consume most of their budget, like writing a new UI toolkit, or using a split frontend/backend architecture. Same mistake Mozilla made. Meanwhile IntelliJ was continuously refactored and improved, so Fleet chased a moving target even when they reused a lot of code.
Although people will hate to hear it, the history of the IDE market suggests that eventually MS will get tired of funding VS Code without a big revenue stream to justify its existence. Executives like making new projects and being able to present growth because it represents glittering future potential, but they hate being landed with the maintenance of loss making legacy projects when the originators move on. There's no glory there. For all their problems, JetBrains aren't going to lose interest in their core products due to random executive churn, and that has given their core IDEs a remarkable staying power.
"Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up."
Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.
It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.
A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.
Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.
Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.
The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.
To be honest, I'm a bit annoyed that I installed maybe 2-3 extensions, and in the last year or so whenever I open one of their IDEs I need to update anywhere from 10 to 25 extensions. What are these things? Where did they come from and why do I have them, I used to see only the extensions that I actually installed, and now there's all kind of stuff that I thought was basic functionality.
A lot of core functionality is implemented as bundled plugins (they ship with the IDE, but can receive updates separately). They can also be independently disabled (and older versions used to come with only some enabled and ask you which others you want enabled at first launch).
Good, I tried Fleet but it was like VSCode without the extensions (as in a community, they had support for plugins or whatever but the support wasn't there) and I don't like VSCode even with extensions. It was the worst of all worlds.
Let the people that want to build an IDE from the ground up have their fun over in VSCode land, please just focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.
PS: Agentic development is fine to pursue but so far things like Claude Code run laps around everything JetBrains has tried. Add "mount points" for agentic flows but please just focus on making a powerful IDE. Agentic development was unable to lure me away from JetBrains, double down on that, not trying to be Cursor.
> User feedback was consistent: If you already work with IntelliJ IDEA, Rider, WebStorm, PyCharm, or any other JetBrains IDE, switching to Fleet required a strong reason – and Fleet did not offer enough value to justify the transition from IDEs you already know and love.
My problem was that Fleet just wasn't very good when compared with VSC.
For my more serious development I use JetBrains IDEs (one of the few pieces of software that I actually pay for, alongside MobaXTerm and some others) but Fleet didn't neither use that much less resources, nor was that much more responsive, nor was a step above VSC in any way. To be clear, I didn't hate it, it wasn't horrible and with a bit more work could have been quite good... just not convincingly so up until now.
If they wanted to throw some more years of engineering at it, maybe, I mean look at what Zed is doing and it seems to be okay, but I don't think it makes that much business sense for them - they already have Junie available in their editors for AI stuff and that other subscription (though I just use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and sometimes VSC with KiloCode/RooCode/Cline and either those models through the API or Cerebras Code since it works pretty well in there).
I just find that most AI solutions out there are also a little bit half-baked, like Gemini CLI fails when I paste multiple lines into it, whereas KiloCode/RooCode/Cline are unable to give a model enough helpful instructions for it to not start looping when it fails applying a complex diff sometimes, and pretty much nothing outside of the regular GitHub Copilot plugins does autocomplete decently (especially if you want a local model with Ollama or something, no good options, Continue.dev is trash).
With how prevalent AI is and how useful various linters and build output is, sometimes I wonder whether I need to pay hundreds of euros for the Ultimate package of tools when I don't write/refactor as much code manually and doing what I need inside of VSC also feels more and more sufficient. Maybe a bit except Java codebases, Spring Boot sometimes does weird shit and you're better served by an IDE that's aware of all of the templating, annotations and other stuff.
Oh well, despite being RAM hogs, I still enjoy the experience of using JetBrains IDEs and if nothing else will keep them around for that reason for a while. A bit like how I also enjoy a GUI of some sort for Git, like previously I paid for GitKraken but reevaluating my usage found that SourceTree is also decent enough for the price (free vs GitKraken paid version), I can just drop down to the CLI for niche use cases.
This seems to be hot on the trail of a new Island UI which is, sadly a terrible update. Everything has become bog slow in the latest version of the IDE, from opening the application to typing latency and cursor movement.
Fleet came at a time when intellij felt extremely bloated. iirc they had painted themselves into a corner where it was easier to rip the band aid and start anew.
Fleet was supposed to be that promised editor which was snappy and had the power of intellisense + all things we liked about Intellij editors ... but without the terrible glacial bloat. but in a stroke of bad luck and typical lack of focus from Jetbrains, Fleet just didn't get good enough quickly.
I say lack of focus because (like their multiple attempts at AI) Jetbrains also had a lite mode in the start but that didn't work great. then came Fleet. But it was not getting better quickly enough and they changed course to make Fleet their main cross platform editor ... but even that didn't take.
I really am worried for Jetbrains and intellij. In a world where even VScode is having its lunch eaten by Cursor, Jetbrains is quickly getting pushed out of the list of contenders. they've squandered away a lead they once had in a certain niche for code editors.
I personally only pull up Intellij these days when there's some platform specific tool that's built in (like the emulator in Android Studio) or certain Android specific profiling tools, or the debugger.
Otherwise I rarely find myself using Intellij. My usage has dropped precipitously.
I mean I see this attitude the same as "Microsoft has taken over the world, no other software will ever succeed" back in the past. Turns out Microsoft didn't take over the world and it was just part of a cycle.
I left JetBrains in January after a very long time; with the new UI, there was realistically not a lot separating it from VSCode, and it was clear where all the fun was.
I didn’t really want to switch to VSC but the extensions made it easy to find things that you just couldn’t do in IntelliJ, and… I haven’t looked back. Haven’t really missed the suite at all.
> We confirmed that another AI editor would not stand out, especially in a market filled with AI-first VS Code forks. It became increasingly clear that the best path forward was to strengthen AI workflows in our existing IDEs. However, rapid progress in AI revealed a different niche where Fleet fits much more naturally.
It would stand out if you focused on performance and not rebuilding another sluggish Java based editor. Zed is what I'll be ditching my JetBrains sub for, and it is not just some VS Code based editor. What happened to JetBrains? They used to be amazing, now its just disappointment all around? Did they elect a terrible CEO?
Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year.
Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.
Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.
Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.
I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.
I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again
With Claude Code + Zed I might be cancelling mine as well.
I thought with Kotlin they'd invest a ton of energy into Kotlin Native in order to produce fully native IDEs that can squeeze out drastically more performance, but its been over a decade of nothing happening with Kotlin that's worthwhile (despite it having had so much potential, and being a literal key language for Android ???) so I'm really kind of over JetBrains, the only thing I'll miss is DataGrip since Zed is a code editor not a DB editor. Fleet was a good idea, but poorly done, the UI was weird as hell, and it did not feel like it was as snappy as something like Zed or Sublime.
> Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it.
I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.
I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.
I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.
Yeah that should work, you can remove all the AI stuff with a single setting and the rest should be fine.
I also cancelled my All Products subscription a while ago. I have been an IntelliJ user since the early 2000s and gave up after in 2025, it would still forget how a Maven project with some generated files should be built, with everything turning to a sea of red until you reimported the project and redid all your settings again. Job #1.
There was always a regression like this in every new build, along with the performance issues. Also switched to Zed + Claude Code/Codex.
I will miss the debugger (a little bit).
Really? I'm daily driving JetBrains IDEs on Apple M3 and don't recognize any if this. Just give it a bunch of extra heap memory (eg 4g instead if 1gb) and it's fast!
I have given it up to 30GB of heap and i tried many different GC configs, i even ran it and my project on ramdisk.
The issue is related to using a monorepo with lots of code in different languages - openening single folders is fine. Ut i want to be able to work on dozens of services in a single window, all other editors manage just fine
I know what I'm about to write is a meme, however: I stopped having any performance issue after switching to GNU Emacs for my code editing. Granted, as an infrastructure guy I the codebases I work with aren't always super large.
However, it's been crazy fast since always. Lately the lisp engine also got compilation to native code, so it's even faster. I occasionally get a slow down when I open a new project and emacs has to wait for the language server to boot.
> I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
Magit is cool :P
Also, emacs is free and runs pretty much everywhere. Truly worth learning.
I hope this doesn't get you b& from here, lol.
It's true! I don't get people who shill for them, do they get paid? Are they employees or something?
Ever year or so I get someone telling me "no it's not bad bla bla, they fixed a lot of things, you should try it now", then I download it and it's the same bloated piece of crap that takes 5 seconds and maxes out CPU to autocomplete a word.
Same thing with Mozilla/Firefox, "no no, I promise you it's better now", I download it and it's the same crap, 100 %CPU all the time, ... The only change I see is bars/buttons keeps getting larger each time, lol.
I've been using Firefox and Jetbrains for about a decade. Firefox is currently using 0.8% CPU while streaming music in another tab. The only speed difference between it and Chrome is that Chrome will prefetch pages in the background, which appears to make it faster on clicks. However, even were it much slower than Chromium alternatives, I would never give up my fully functioning uBlock Origin.
But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.
More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.
It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.
I don't know how their IDEs were advertised to you or how large the codebases you work on are.
I get fast enough autocomplete (sub second), and full line completion just fine, and I never use/buy top of the line systems. (using a midrange ~2020 thinkpad).
But I'm in a similar place as the comment you replied to. Unless they start focusing again on improving they existing product line, next year I might not renew my licenses anymore.
Before AI took over, I was following closely their release notes and announcements because there where on the right path on improving experience.
What makes their IDE look bad is their indexing process, during which it is slow and completions will not show up. If you know about this quirk you know where to look for it (it's visible in the status bar), and know what triggers it (dependencies installation and such). After so many years, I really feel the solution for that is pretty "simple", "just" run the indexing on a snapshot that is not shared with the running instance and swap out indexes when done.
I know about the indexing, marking directories correctly so as not to trigger reindexing etc etc.
Since i work on a couple dozen services in a monorepo in a few languages, no amount of heap memory or CPU will be enough.
One days its the grapqhl plugin, the next day its typescript type inferrence, then something with rust, it just never stops. Sometimes even the golang operations are slow.
Its all just monorepo issues, but i expect my IDE to be able to handle a monorepo, all other IDEs work without issue (and are inferior in functionality sadly)
Everyone who promotes a product they use every day doesn't have to be a paid shill. I like PyCharm, DataGrip, and IntelliJ because they generally work very well for me at my day job and open source side projects.
Firefox is an odd case because I've personally never experienced stability issues with it on Ubuntu. The only problem I've had in the past is some Google products are noticeably slower than on Chromium. Colleagues of mine have had stability issues on Windows though.
Yeah, I'm not a paid shill. I have been using IntelliJ since version 2 way back in 2003(?). Yes, it's had its performance issues, but people tend to forget the feature set they brought to market, and have continued to do so. But, my career is dead now, as I am an unemployed loser. So, 2026 will probably be the first year that I no longer have an updated IntelliJ.
I'm about to cancel mine as well, but JetBrains really does make top quality editors, especially for their respective languages, the next closest one would be Visual Studio for C# / .NET development, and even VS gets enhanced by ReSharper... which is a JetBrains product. I would like it if JetBrains would invest in the performance isssues as a #1 priority. They've dropped the ball on Kotlin Native and it bewilders me, it had so much more potential to their benefit.
Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining two overlapping product lines.
I want to begin by saying I love JetBrains IDEs. I go out of my way to personally pay for PyCharm Professional, DataGrip, Rider, and others, and have done so for years, so I can use it at work where the next best thing provided to us is VS Code, or Visual Studio...
Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.
I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.
Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.
However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.
You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.
To pick up on one of the points in the article:
> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.
You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.
I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.
Dropping Fleet is a good move. Just please for the love of God focus on your IDEs. Stop getting distracted with AI slop.
>Stop getting distracted with AI slop
In the business cycle this is particularly risky.
You'll have a smaller base of users that don't want AI slop, but will keep using your AI anyway even if it's there.
But what you lose is the large paying corporate customers that demand 'soup de jour' that end up going to VScode or whatever, and you may never get them back.
Building software is hard, being profitable at it is even harder.
If JetBrains want's to provide a simple plugin for Copilot or Anthropic to keep the vibe coders happy, I'm not going to complain about the feature. It just seems for the past couple years they have been primarily distracted with AI: AI Assistant, Junie, and now agentics.
Open source it & let community take over?
It's probably a wise move and not so different to what many other companies have experienced in the past.
Netscape tried to remake Navigator whilst halting development on the old codebase, and it killed them.
Microsoft tried to remake Word, the rewrite failed. Luckily they had continued to develop the old codebase in parallel.
Google tried to remake Gmail multiple times. Every attempt failed.
Apple tried for years to remake MacOS Classic and failed every time. Eventually they had to buy and reskin NeXTStep.
Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up.
I kinda expected Fleet to die from the day it was first announced. IntelliJ is an extremely mature product that's hard to compete with. They've continually managed big changes to it to keep up with changing fashions and trends in the IDE space, most recently with their new Islands theme that launched yesterday, with integrated coding agents and so on. It's outlasted continuous competition from free IDEs that are always abandoned after enough years pass and whichever executive was championing subsidies moves on or retires (see: NetBeans, Eclipse, VS Express, MonoDevelop...). VS Code isn't so different. Fleet was clearly a reaction to that but the concept was not innovative and focused on reinventing wheels that users wouldn't be able to tell the difference for and which would consume most of their budget, like writing a new UI toolkit, or using a split frontend/backend architecture. Same mistake Mozilla made. Meanwhile IntelliJ was continuously refactored and improved, so Fleet chased a moving target even when they reused a lot of code.
Although people will hate to hear it, the history of the IDE market suggests that eventually MS will get tired of funding VS Code without a big revenue stream to justify its existence. Executives like making new projects and being able to present growth because it represents glittering future potential, but they hate being landed with the maintenance of loss making legacy projects when the originators move on. There's no glory there. For all their problems, JetBrains aren't going to lose interest in their core products due to random executive churn, and that has given their core IDEs a remarkable staying power.
"Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up."
Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.
It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.
A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.
Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.
Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.
The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.
Alls they need to do is make extensions much much easier to build, especially extensions that render HTML.
That's vscode's moat.
Anytime the same extension exist in both vscode and jetbrains, the jetbrains version is clunky, crash, and unstable.
I keep Jetbrains open while using vscode, for its local history/git/etc features, but how long will that be enough to keep my subscription
To be honest, I'm a bit annoyed that I installed maybe 2-3 extensions, and in the last year or so whenever I open one of their IDEs I need to update anywhere from 10 to 25 extensions. What are these things? Where did they come from and why do I have them, I used to see only the extensions that I actually installed, and now there's all kind of stuff that I thought was basic functionality.
A lot of core functionality is implemented as bundled plugins (they ship with the IDE, but can receive updates separately). They can also be independently disabled (and older versions used to come with only some enabled and ask you which others you want enabled at first launch).
Good, I tried Fleet but it was like VSCode without the extensions (as in a community, they had support for plugins or whatever but the support wasn't there) and I don't like VSCode even with extensions. It was the worst of all worlds.
Let the people that want to build an IDE from the ground up have their fun over in VSCode land, please just focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.
PS: Agentic development is fine to pursue but so far things like Claude Code run laps around everything JetBrains has tried. Add "mount points" for agentic flows but please just focus on making a powerful IDE. Agentic development was unable to lure me away from JetBrains, double down on that, not trying to be Cursor.
>focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.
Too bad everyone wants a different one of these.
> User feedback was consistent: If you already work with IntelliJ IDEA, Rider, WebStorm, PyCharm, or any other JetBrains IDE, switching to Fleet required a strong reason – and Fleet did not offer enough value to justify the transition from IDEs you already know and love.
My problem was that Fleet just wasn't very good when compared with VSC.
For my more serious development I use JetBrains IDEs (one of the few pieces of software that I actually pay for, alongside MobaXTerm and some others) but Fleet didn't neither use that much less resources, nor was that much more responsive, nor was a step above VSC in any way. To be clear, I didn't hate it, it wasn't horrible and with a bit more work could have been quite good... just not convincingly so up until now.
If they wanted to throw some more years of engineering at it, maybe, I mean look at what Zed is doing and it seems to be okay, but I don't think it makes that much business sense for them - they already have Junie available in their editors for AI stuff and that other subscription (though I just use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and sometimes VSC with KiloCode/RooCode/Cline and either those models through the API or Cerebras Code since it works pretty well in there).
I just find that most AI solutions out there are also a little bit half-baked, like Gemini CLI fails when I paste multiple lines into it, whereas KiloCode/RooCode/Cline are unable to give a model enough helpful instructions for it to not start looping when it fails applying a complex diff sometimes, and pretty much nothing outside of the regular GitHub Copilot plugins does autocomplete decently (especially if you want a local model with Ollama or something, no good options, Continue.dev is trash).
With how prevalent AI is and how useful various linters and build output is, sometimes I wonder whether I need to pay hundreds of euros for the Ultimate package of tools when I don't write/refactor as much code manually and doing what I need inside of VSC also feels more and more sufficient. Maybe a bit except Java codebases, Spring Boot sometimes does weird shit and you're better served by an IDE that's aware of all of the templating, annotations and other stuff.
Oh well, despite being RAM hogs, I still enjoy the experience of using JetBrains IDEs and if nothing else will keep them around for that reason for a while. A bit like how I also enjoy a GUI of some sort for Git, like previously I paid for GitKraken but reevaluating my usage found that SourceTree is also decent enough for the price (free vs GitKraken paid version), I can just drop down to the CLI for niche use cases.
This seems to be hot on the trail of a new Island UI which is, sadly a terrible update. Everything has become bog slow in the latest version of the IDE, from opening the application to typing latency and cursor movement.
If you want a fast native IDE like Fleet except better, try Zed (you can disable all AI features if you wish).
this is bittersweet news.
but sigh. Jetbrains really just has no focus.
Fleet came at a time when intellij felt extremely bloated. iirc they had painted themselves into a corner where it was easier to rip the band aid and start anew.
Fleet was supposed to be that promised editor which was snappy and had the power of intellisense + all things we liked about Intellij editors ... but without the terrible glacial bloat. but in a stroke of bad luck and typical lack of focus from Jetbrains, Fleet just didn't get good enough quickly.
I say lack of focus because (like their multiple attempts at AI) Jetbrains also had a lite mode in the start but that didn't work great. then came Fleet. But it was not getting better quickly enough and they changed course to make Fleet their main cross platform editor ... but even that didn't take.
I really am worried for Jetbrains and intellij. In a world where even VScode is having its lunch eaten by Cursor, Jetbrains is quickly getting pushed out of the list of contenders. they've squandered away a lead they once had in a certain niche for code editors.
I personally only pull up Intellij these days when there's some platform specific tool that's built in (like the emulator in Android Studio) or certain Android specific profiling tools, or the debugger.
Otherwise I rarely find myself using Intellij. My usage has dropped precipitously.
> We are now building a new product focused on agentic development
This is sad. It seems innovation has all but stopped for IDEs intended for a human as the primary driver.
I mean I see this attitude the same as "Microsoft has taken over the world, no other software will ever succeed" back in the past. Turns out Microsoft didn't take over the world and it was just part of a cycle.
It hasn't : )
Hi!
I left JetBrains in January after a very long time; with the new UI, there was realistically not a lot separating it from VSCode, and it was clear where all the fun was.
I didn’t really want to switch to VSC but the extensions made it easy to find things that you just couldn’t do in IntelliJ, and… I haven’t looked back. Haven’t really missed the suite at all.
> We confirmed that another AI editor would not stand out, especially in a market filled with AI-first VS Code forks. It became increasingly clear that the best path forward was to strengthen AI workflows in our existing IDEs. However, rapid progress in AI revealed a different niche where Fleet fits much more naturally.
It would stand out if you focused on performance and not rebuilding another sluggish Java based editor. Zed is what I'll be ditching my JetBrains sub for, and it is not just some VS Code based editor. What happened to JetBrains? They used to be amazing, now its just disappointment all around? Did they elect a terrible CEO?